[OPE] One party state?

What troubles me is that in modern ideological discourse the very notion of
"democracy" is fudged.

Democracy is equated with pluralism, i.e. if you have pluralism then you
have evidence of democracy. The ideological function of this equation is to
hide the fact that majority rule does not exist for the majority. Pluralism
is then in turn often equated with freedom of speech, or the co-existence of
"other voices", but this does not of course mean ideologically that other
ideas are take seriously at all.

Democracy=pluralism is a liberal opinion about democracy. Of course there is
pluralism in Cuba, it is physically impossible for all these people to agree
about everything.

Unpacking this, it turns out that democracy is equated with a "particular
type" of pluralism. Now what is that type? The type we have at home. So the
argument is then really that those foreign folks are not democratic, because
they don't have our kind of democracy.

That's pretty banale. In that case, we might as well argue that the US and
Cuba are both one-party states, with equal force of logic and evidential
support.

Jurriaan

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Received on Sat Jun 6 06:10:05 2009